Strauss: Metamorphosen
The Nash Ensemble
Reducing the string size of Strauss's Metamorphosen from 23 to the seven of the composer's short score… might seem to be going light on the tragic force of this great wartime elegy. Not so...
Strauss: Metamorphosen
The Nash Ensemble
Purchase product
Reducing the string size of Strauss's Metamorphosen from 23 to the seven of the composer's short score… might seem to be going light on the tragic force of this great wartime elegy. Not so...
About
This is The Nash Ensemble at its very bestfull-blooded performances of red-meat chamber music. Metamorphosen can in some ways be regarded as Richard Strausss heart-rending reaction against the wartime destruction of German culture and heritage. Completed in the spring of 1945, the work is at once angry, poignant and intensely beautiful. The version performed here is derived from Strausss original score for seven stringed instruments (he later expanded it to twenty-three), and incorporates the revisions to the closing bars made in subsequent versions. The Piano Quartet is an early work, composed some sixty years before the valedictory Metamorphosen. In it, one contemporary critic noted, Strauss shows himself a better Brahmsian than Brahms. Strauss was clearly proud of this early compositionhe performed in the premiereand we should not dismiss it purely on the grounds of its coming from the pen of a twenty-one year old. Capriccio also predates Metamorphosen, but only by four years. This last of Strausss ground-breaking operas opens with an extended movement for string sextetthis is no arrangementas the composer character Flamand competes with his poet rival for the hand of the delectable Madeleine. The result is of such searingly intense emotion that Strauss successfully granted the 1942 premiere to a hated Nazi official in return for safe passage out of Germany for his son and part-Jewish wife.
Contents and tracklist
Awards and reviews
March 2007
Reducing the string size of Strauss's Metamorphosen from 23 to the seven of the composer's short score… might seem to be going light on the tragic force of this great wartime elegy. Not so in the hands of the Nash Ensemble. Truthful recording does full justice to the warmth, poise and integration of these marvellous performances.
The music’s autumnal soulfulness suits The Nash Ensemble’s house style to near-perfection … the same classy artistry shines through their performances of the string sextet prelude to Strauss’s last opera Capriccio, and of the much earlier Piano Quartet—Brahms and Schumann-influenced and very attractive
2010
The early and late Strauss on this finely recorded disc are separated by some 60 years: the Piano Quartet was completed in 1884, the year after Wagner's death, while Metamorphosen dates from the early months of 1945. Strauss at 20 had abundant promise: Strauss at 80 had managed to avoid lapsing intoer self-parody. The result is full of interest.
The Piano Quartet is invariably labelled 'Brahmsian' and the opening makes that association clear. Yet the piece is too loosely put together, too focused on small-scale harmonic effects, to sound like Brahms for long. Anyone looking for evidence that Strauss's true metier would be programme music and opera need look no further. It's an enjoyable piece for all that, expansively dramatic and genuinely expressive with that touch of spontaneity which signals Strauss at his best.
The Nash Ensemble bring affectionate fervour to the Quartet, without lingering excessively over its creakier transitions. A cooler touch might have been preferable with the Capriccio Prelude and Metamorphosen – the latter in particular risks overheating, with uniformly high dynamic levels. The status of this version of Metamorphosen is ambiguous, since it derives from a draft discovered in 1990. This preceded the final scoring for 23 solo strings, and one wonders if Strauss might not have revised the former in light of the latter had he wished to preserve it – especially the very awkward harmonic switch at the end, which the final version eliminates. A curiosity, then, which inevitably sounds more like a dilution of the familiar score than a genuine alternative.
